Blocking has always been all-or-nothing. You could block youtube.com, or you could not — and if you use YouTube for work, for learning, or for music, “block YouTube” was never a real option. So the part that actually costs you hours stayed.
SiteBlocker 4.4 fixes that. You can now turn off one part of a site and leave the rest working. It is free for everyone.
What you can turn off
Six sections, and they do not all behave the same way. That difference matters, so here it is plainly:
Blocked outright — the page stops opening, and its buttons and thumbnails are hidden too:
- YouTube Shorts — normal videos, subscriptions, search and playlists keep working
- Instagram Reels — messages, stories and your feed keep working
- Reddit r/popular and r/all — the subreddits you actually subscribe to keep working
- Facebook Reels — Messenger, groups, events and Marketplace keep working
Hidden, not blocked — the links in are hidden, but the feed stays reachable:
- TikTok For You
- X “For you”
Those last two are hidden rather than blocked for a reason that is worth understanding, because it is the same reason most “block TikTok’s feed” claims elsewhere are not true. TikTok’s For You feed is what tiktok.com serves by default — it has no separate address, so a rule that caught it would have to match the whole site. On X, “For you” and “Following” are both x.com/home, and which tab you are on is held inside the page, never in the address. Nothing can tell them apart from the outside.
We could have called all six “blocked” and most people would never have checked. Hiding the entry point is genuinely useful — it makes the feed something you have to go looking for rather than something you land on — but it is not a block, and calling it one would be the kind of promise that turns into a one-star review.
Hiding the way in matters as much as the block
Blocking only the address leaves a row of Shorts thumbnails on your homepage every single visit. The block then arrives after you have already been tempted, which is the wrong order.
So each section hides its own entry points as well: the Shorts shelf on the YouTube homepage and in search results, the Shorts button in the sidebar, the Reels tab, the r/popular link in Reddit’s navigation. The thing stops being offered to you, not just stops opening.
The part that was genuinely hard
Almost nobody types youtube.com/shorts into the address bar. They are already on YouTube, they see a Short in the feed, and they click it.
That click does not load a new page. YouTube swaps the content in and rewrites the address with history.pushState, and the whole document stays put. SiteBlocker’s blocking runs once when a page loads — so the most common way into Shorts was, structurally, invisible to it. Blocking youtube.com/shorts and stopping there would have shipped a feature that missed the majority of real visits.
4.4 watches for that kind of navigation. The obvious way to do it is the browser’s webNavigation API, and we did not use it: it requires the “read your browsing history” permission, which every existing user would have been prompted to approve on update. That is a real cost to charge people for one feature, and it is at odds with collecting no browsing data. Instead the check runs inside the page itself, and only on sites that own a section you have actually switched on. Every other page on the web installs nothing at all — no watcher, no timer.
Of the six, only YouTube’s element selectors have been measured against the live site so far: on a search page, 31 visible Shorts links before, 0 after. The other five are derived from each site’s URL structure, which is the stable part, but they have not been verified the same way. If you spot one that misses something, tell us.
Also in this release
Some of 4.4 is repair work, and it is worth being straight about it.
Signing up from inside the extension was broken for about six weeks. Two server functions were written but never actually deployed, so anyone who picked a plan inside the extension hit a dead end at the signup step. If you tried to upgrade between mid-July and late August and it silently failed, that was this, and it is fixed.
Checkout and the billing portal were down for ten days in August, along with calendar sync and account deletion. That one came from a change on our hosting provider’s side rather than ours, and it healed on theirs — but we had no alerting that would have caught it, which is our fault, not theirs. There is alerting now, and errors that used to fail quietly now report themselves.
The Keywords on/off switch was invisible. A UI component was missing part of itself, so the control rendered with nothing to click — keyword blocking could not be turned on or off from its own page at all. Fixed, and we swept every other switch in the app for the same defect.
Turning a section off
- Install SiteBlocker for Chrome or Firefox
- Open the Block List tab and scroll to Distracting sections
- Switch on what you want gone, and leave the site itself off your block list
That is it. No account needed.
If you want the detail for one section, there is a page for each: YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Reddit r/popular, Facebook Reels, TikTok For You and X For You. Or start with the overview of blocking short-form video.
What stays free
Section blocking is free, and so is everything that was free before it:
- Custom blocklists, as many sites as you want
- Section blocking, all six
- Smart scheduling
- Focus Mode with a Pomodoro timer
- Whitelist mode
- Cross-device sync
- Zero data collection
SiteBlocker Pro adds Locked Mode, daily time budgets, calendar-triggered blocking, keyword blocking and the full insights dashboard, from $2.99 a month.
